My Favorite Xamarin 4 Feature

The last week Xamarin introduce his latest new bundle tools version wich include a lot of improvements for the platforms and bran new amazing tools like Xamarin Inspector and Xamarin UI Test Recorder.

Is hard for me only select one Xamarin 4 Feature, so I decided to create an app "Score App" to explore all this new features and select my favorite one, so lets started with the features "less talk, more code".

Xamarin.Forms 2.0

Android Material Design Support

I love material design, I love fab (Floating Action Button) and all those beauty colors let me show you this on action:

Looks beauty no, let me tell you that you can implement it in a simple 3 steps

1 Use the FormsAppCompatActivity.

2 Setting up the toolbar and tabs resource.

3 Adding a beauty Android theme you.

ListView New Catching Strategy

On of the weaknesses of Xamarin.Forms is the performance of a complex listview cells but with this new feature now you can use the RecycleElement to avoid memory leaks on the lists, so lets check it on action.

and the best part is that you only need to pass a parameter in the ListView's constructor :3.

Xamarin Test Recorder, UITest and Test Cloud

This is an awesome and powerful tool to create a 5 star app avoiding the large testing process with this tool now we can create UITest scripts recording the steps on the device and then running it on a Xamarin Test Cloud Platform see it running :).

Xamarin Insights

An old friend but renovated also this a good tool to complete your Xamarin apps lifecycle with this tools you can track all your live app usage info in order to attack in time record all the future bugs on your app.

you only need two lines of code to start using it and the api will start providing you all the info that you want for your app tracking.

Xamarin Inspector

What do you think if I tell you that you can see your Xamarin app in 3D and yeah this tool shows your app items in a 3D view whit the Xamarin Inspector now you can inspect all your visual elements inside of your app, lets see it in action.

AND THE WINNER IS...

"XAMARIN TEST RECORDER"

"Quality" is the word, is no enough to create an awesome and cool apps also you need to maintain it and test it with the thousands of the current devices in the market to make all your customers/users happy and using this tool you don't need to have a big knowledge of testing as a developer you can create your test script by using you simulator event if you don't want to buy dozens of devices you can upload this UITest scripts and test it via Xamarin Test Cloud saving a lot of money and future paperweights and remember "Quality" is the word.

Xamarin.Forms: Custom Context Actions on iOS
Hello folks now is time to talk about customize context action views on Xamarin.Forms cell for iOS (yes the red/light-gray options that appear when you swipe a cell) the default colors are not a good-looking, so right now is a little bit tricky to achieve that but we will use a reflection technique to achieve the next two escenarios: Change background color for default and destructive context actionSet custom view for default and destructive context action
first at all, lets take a look to native impl. on Xamarin.Forms Github project on the next url https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/blob/ae92582d5acad2b8aeab9a2ed5b490561e71bd6c/Xamarin.Forms.Platform.iOS/ContextActionCell.cs#L14

Here we have two key items "DestructiveBackground" and "NormalBackground" both are the Images that Xamarin.Forms use to put as background on the default ContextActions view(Gray/Red)